According to Reuters Paul Allen (MS Co-Founder) is looking to sell the the Tech TV cable TV network. It’s worth between $250 – $300 million, and has one of the most loyal fan bases I’ve ever seen for a niche network. There are literally thousands of fan sites for the various shows they air.. it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. Anyone else remember ZDTV, before they got bought out and turned into TechTV?
Archive for August, 2003
Going, Going….
August 27th, 2003When Religious Fanaticism Goes Terribly Wrong
August 25th, 2003An 8 year old boy died during a prayer service Friday in a Milwaukee Church at the hands of religous wacko’s who were trying to ‘remove a spirit from’ the autistic child.
Faith Temple of the Apostolic Faith, on the Northwest side of town is where the incident took place, and the pastor who was performing the ceremony, or whatever it was, expects no charges to be filled in connection with the boy’s death:
“He just passed away,” Pastor David Hemphill said of the boy. “God is a mysterious person, and if he wants to call a life back, he does.”
Never mind the fact that they allegedly had an autistic child (many of whom are ultra sensative to stress and pain) tied down with bedsheets for over two hours while they attempted to chase the ‘devil’ out of him.
What really gets me when stories like this come out are how the people always quote some bible passage that supposedly lets them off the hook for whatever it is they were doing wrong. This pastor said, “We did what the Book of Matthew said, Chapter 12.”. Well, I just took a minute to read Matthew Chapter 12, and the only thing I can see this pastor might be talking about is this, “Then they brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see.”
Did I misread St. Matthew? Because I couldn’t find any reference to wrapping children up in white sheets, or that somewhow, people besides Jesus had the power to heal the sick. At any rate, aren’t we in the 21st century over the whole “Anyone with a malady must be possesed by evil demons?” crock of BS? If these kind of wacko’s had their way, they’d be excersizing the demons out of anyone who kicked a soccer ball with their left foot.
And the defense is always the, “Well we interpret the scripture to mean $VARIABLE” where $VARIABLE is whatever shit they’re trying to pull, or whatever their trying to defend themselves against, in this case, having a young boy die while they were performing their little miracle.
You can see the same sort of thing going on with the shenanigans going on right now in Alabama about the ‘right’ of a judge to put a marble statue of the 10 commandments on display in a public courthouse, thereby endorsing his faith as the ‘offical’ religion of the courthouse, and by extension, the Alabama legal system.
Of course, the lawsuits started flying, and the Surpeme Court choose not to hear his case, which left a lower court ruling stand that ordered for the removal of the piece, on the grounds that it violated the Constitutional Ammendment that provides for seperation of church and state. Then last week, all eight Alabama federal judges ordered the thing down as well. Well naturally, the judge who put the statue up wasn’t convinced that he was wrong, and his defense is now something along the lines of “Gods laws overrule the laws of man.”.
This my friends, is fanaticism at it’s core. The judge, Chief Justice Moore, says his reading of the Alabama Constitution leads him to believe that the Ten Commandments are perfectly legal where they sit, since Alabama’s heritage is founded on religous beliefs. In his world, and the world of all the fundamentalists like him, God’s law trumps human law.
Which is fine… Unless you happen not to believe in God to begin with, or your higher power of choice goes by a different name like Allah, Buddah, Marth Stewart, etc…
And thats what these people who support the judge are missing when they talk about their freedom of speech being trampled on by not being allowed to have the statue sit where it does.
This country was founded by religous people, yes. But they founded this country because they felt their religous ideals were being trampled in their home country, hence when they got here, they were smart enough to write into our Constitution that while people have the right to practice their own religion, the Government shall have no business in promoting one religion over another.
When a Federal Judge disobeys his country’s laws and state’s court orders so he can push his particular religion, that’s not seperation, that’s integration — which is historically ironic considering Alabama’s famous segregation stance of the past.
If you think I’m wrong, ask yourself how many supporters this guy would have if he had a two ton statue of Islam’s holy book, the Book of Koran, installed in the rotunda of a state courthouse, and how fast he’d be riddiculed for supporting a particular religion.
Just because it’s Christianity the judge and the pastor are using as their defense doesn’t magically make them impervious to the laws that we humans have put in place.
The ‘X’ in XFS
August 21st, 2003The XFS filesystem has been in the press quite a bit over the past few days due to SCO’s claims of ownership over it and other technologies. This has led a lot of people to ask what XFS stands for. Even well known open source leaders aren’t sure what the acronym stands for it seems, as Bruce Parens refers to it as the ‘eXtent File System’ in discussion about the SCO claims.
So today Steve Lord, principal filesystem engineer at SGI and XFS developer, sent out the following note to clear up the confusion:
Just in case you were wondering what X stood for in XFS – some folks
out there seem to be putting the X in the middle of words recently.
The X does not stand for anything except X, it is not eXtent, or
eXtended or any other word.
Originally the project was internally refered to as xFS, presumably
until marketing came up with a letter or name which was deemed
acceptable. After a while the x just stuck without having a
meaning assigned to it, and it was capitalized.
Think of it as a little like the G in GNU, the X in XFS stands
for XFS ;-)
Steve
More SCO Madness
August 19th, 2003SCO, the company that is claiming pieces of it’s operating system were copied into Linux, is having their developer conference this week, where the focus is naturally on… how Linux developers stole it’s code.
At first, they said they had proof of a few lines of SMP (more than one CPU) code that were copied into the linux kernel, then it was a filesystem (JFS), then the code for managing huge amounts of memory on big servers (NUMA). Well, instead of just stopping there, they’re now saying:
… several enterprise features of Linux–the NUMA (nonuniform memory access), RCU (read-copy update), SMP (symmetrical multiprocessing), schedulers, JFS (journal file system) and XFS (extended file system) portions–all include copied code. The company broke out the number of lines of code that had been directly copied from each.
The funny thing here that caught my eye is the mention of the XFS filesystem, which is one I’m involved with, and have been using for over three years. See, they’re implying that because there’s code from XFS in the linux kernel (and there is no XFS code in the 2.4.x series of linux kernels which they’re suing over, only the 2.6.x kernels, which just further illustrates the point) – which is true, XFS has been added to the linux kernel, but under the GPL license and by the company that invented it SGI – that all those other things (the ones they’re actually suing over, we think) are copied too, and therefore illegal.
Of course, they’re missing the point that NUMA, RCU, SMP, JFS, and XFS, were all invented by other companies (IBM and SGI mostly) many years ago, and they’ve now been ‘given’ to the linux kernel by those companies. So at their conference, they showed this slide which they’re saying is proof of code copying in the Linux kernel. Of course, they’re not saying what it’s copied from or if it’s even illegal that it is copied, they just pick a piece of code, remove some parts, and say, “LOOK!! This code was copied!”.
And sure enough, the code in that slide was copied into the linux kernel. What the slide doesn’t show, and what SCO fails to tell us is that the code isn’t SCO’s code at all. In fact, here’s the piece of code they’re saying was stolen, but they didn’t want people to see the complete code they’re claiming was stolen, or else this would’ve showed at the top of the file:
Oooops.
So, to wrap up, SCO shows a slide of source code, says those evil linux hackers copied it from SCO, but fails to mention it’s actually another companies (SGI) code. And this is the basis for thier whole case against IBM, Linux, and open source software in general. Why SCO isn’t being investigated for this kind of deceit I’m not sure, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that their case is based in a world were ethics and logic don’t apply.
Impressive Outage Performance for Hosting Providers
August 18th, 2003Last Thrusday’s power outage in the NorthEast US and SouthEastern Canada may have put the spotlight on how badly our power infrastructure needs to be updated, but something a lot of people didn’t notice was how well Internet hosting providers in those areas held up even without their most critical resource: electricity.
If you remember the hours and days after 9/11, there were a number of problems with hosting providers in the area because they didn’t have the necessary backup proceedures or equipment in place. Sites like Yahoo, Merril Lynch, and CNN were all affected by a lack of preparedness from their respective hosting providers.
So it’s pretty nice to see that when the power went out in such a large area at the end of last week, the major hosting players were ready for it this time, most of them reporting seemless transition to their backup power systems.
Of course, these bigger companies are supposed to have emergency power facilities, usually in the form of diesel generators, on hand as it’s one of their main selling points. One of Toronto’s biggest hosting providers, peer1.net, even helped the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest daily newspapers, help publish a special edition Friday by sharing power from its generators. Peer1 allowed the newspaper to set up a mini-command center within their facility, which permitted approximately 80 journalists to file their stories and transmit them via the Internet to the Star’s printing facility.
That kind of story is something that makes a lot of sense if you think about it. The more and more our society depends on the online world, the more the people that make that online world happen behind the scenes will be seen as the ‘go-to’ facilities in terms of availability and resources. Many of these facilities are built to withstand almost every natural disaster and to be totally self sustaining for an extended period of time, which isn’t something you can say about a lot of places any more.
I expect there’s a lot of shifting of hosting providers this week by companies who were promised “99.9999% uptime with multiple backup generators!!” by hosting providers in the affected area, but who failed to see those promises kept.
Site Stylin
August 9th, 2003I put a few more changes into the CSS of the site, and brought all the little subsections into compliance with the main look and feel I have here on the weblog. Everything should be a bit easier to read now due to better contrast, posts should be easier to tell apart on the front index, and I finally got ride of the little bubble border around linked images (thanks matt and mich :).
Of course, I found out that you can’t see any links in IE5.5 and lower on windows, but I had a look at the stats for my site and saw only a few people who used IE5.5 or lower. Even if you’re using the latest version of IE that does show hot links, there are still a few things it doesn’t display correctly like the curved borders around the boxes to the right and around links.
Check it out in Mozilla sometime for the full effect.
Nice Saturday afternoon here in town today. After doing pretty good for myself in last night’s “Executive Game” of poker, we’ll be spending today at Miller Park for ChuckFest, a celebration of my friend The Chuck. We heard they’re holding a baseball game too in honor of Chuckfest… Time to go!
Charter Meeting of Milwaukee Preservation Alliance
August 6th, 2003For those in the Milwaukee area who are interested in preserving our historic homes, buildings, and old city neighborhoods, the charter meeting of the Milwaukee Preservation Alliance is neeting tonite at 6pm in the first floor conference room of the Main Library on Wisconsin Ave.
If you’ve ever wanted to get involved a little more with civic duties, this is a great chance to get in on the ground floor. Some of us here may remember the news a month or so back about the possibility of a ‘box’ Walgreens taking over a historic building on Sherman Blvd, and many people forming the MPA were behind stopping that sort of commercial sprawl into such a historic neighborhood.
he MPA is a city-wide coalition of people and groups dedicated to the following broad goals:
- promote the value of grand and everyday historic homes, sacred places, and neighborhoods;
- lobby for public policies designed to save our historic homes, sacred places, and neighborhoods;
- promote the development of small businesses on our historic old city commercial strips, like KK, LIncoln, National, Vliet, Center St., MLK, etc.
- strive to make historic preservation a multi-cultural “rainbow” collaboration that includes neighborhood development as a linked goal.
- help show the connection between curbing freeway expansion inside the old city and Milwaukee’s long-term prosperity and quality of life.
- help neighborhoods develop public art projects that reflect the history of ordinary people over the generations and give expression to the beauty of old city architectural and cultural “landscapes.”
- help foster community gardens and green space in Milwaukee’s old city neighborhood.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
